10/8/07: INVADERS OF THE LOST GOLD, NEW BARBARIANS, DEADLY MISSION,CODENAME WILDGEESE, RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS, DEATH DIMENSION
10/5 - 10/8/07 weekend incl. INVADERS OF THE LOST GOLD!
Got to write these down before I forget I ever watched them!
1990 THE BRONX WARRIORS, actually only got to see about 15 minutes before the damned DVD stopped playing ... Looked good though, can't wait to see the rest, especially considering Fred Williamson seems to die at the end, and that is something of a rarity. Also looking forward to seeing more of the lead "Mark Gregory," who is impossibly swishy and flamboyant.
NEW BARBARIANS (Castellari, 1982)
... not to be confused with NEW GLADIATORS! Lots of great violence in this ROAD WARRIOR ripoff ... Fred Williamson shoots Rambo arrows into dudes' necks and t
heir heads explode! There's also a gun that shoots explosive bullets causing fake torsos to blast apart every now and then. George Eastman plays a warlord who later turns out to be some kind of militant gay who 'subjugates' post-nuke refugees by sodomizing them (!!!). The rest of the movie seems to be a contest as to who can sport the biggest shoulder pads. Seriously. Its crazy. What function to those serve? The people wearing them look like extras from the 1980 FLASH GORDON!
Got to write these down before I forget I ever watched them!
1990 THE BRONX WARRIORS, actually only got to see about 15 minutes before the damned DVD stopped playing ... Looked good though, can't wait to see the rest, especially considering Fred Williamson seems to die at the end, and that is something of a rarity. Also looking forward to seeing more of the lead "Mark Gregory," who is impossibly swishy and flamboyant.
NEW BARBARIANS (Castellari, 1982)
... not to be confused with NEW GLADIATORS! Lots of great violence in this ROAD WARRIOR ripoff ... Fred Williamson shoots Rambo arrows into dudes' necks and t
heir heads explode! There's also a gun that shoots explosive bullets causing fake torsos to blast apart every now and then. George Eastman plays a warlord who later turns out to be some kind of militant gay who 'subjugates' post-nuke refugees by sodomizing them (!!!). The rest of the movie seems to be a contest as to who can sport the biggest shoulder pads. Seriously. Its crazy. What function to those serve? The people wearing them look like extras from the 1980 FLASH GORDON!DEADLY MISSION (Castellari, 1978)
... really great Italian WW2 actioner starring ... a guy whose initials are FW. Turns out this is actually INGLORIOUS BASTARDS under a different title! Thrilling kno
ckoff of DIRTY DOZEN only this one has a bevy of naked German frauleins shooting MP40s in one scene. Top THAT. This movie deserves a lot more written about it but I can't be bothered. Turns out I had a copy for years under a third title, GI BRO!Loads and loads of groovy model work.
Speaking of model work ... CODENAME WILDGEESE (Margheriti, 1984)
... is really exceptionally entertai
ning. Its up there with GOLD RAIDERS as my most-satisfying 25 cent purchase. Ernest Borgnine spends the majority of his scenes looking tired and sitting down. Lee Van Cleef does not look well at all and they couldn't even show him getting in or out of a helicopter ... I guess he needed a little help. They just pan over and he starts to walk away from the cockpit like he just got out of it. Anyway, totally NOT a sequel to THE WILD GEESE ... Although it does have mercenaries in it. Totally awesome set pieces with miniatures, one sequence with a gravity-defying sports car driving ALONG a tunnel wall, the other a real showstopper with a fragile-looking helicopter attacking a camp and raining napalm down on Klaus Kinski's head! Seriously ... AWESOME ending.
RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS (Deodato, 1983)
... Disappointing. Very silly a
nd uneventful knockoff of THE ROAD WARRIOR by Ruggero Deodato. I still can't quite suss out what the plot was all about ... I think Atlantis raises, but then a bunch of biker trash attack our band of heroes, and I couldn't quite decide if Atlantis was controlling Earthbound bikers to do bad things, or if they WERE Atlanteans, only appearing on "Earth," or if our heroes were supposed to be ON Atlantis??? Whatever, it was stupid anyway. Awesome box art though. It looks like Ryan O'neal dressed as up Rambo!
... really great Italian WW2 actioner starring ... a guy whose initials are FW. Turns out this is actually INGLORIOUS BASTARDS under a different title! Thrilling kno
ckoff of DIRTY DOZEN only this one has a bevy of naked German frauleins shooting MP40s in one scene. Top THAT. This movie deserves a lot more written about it but I can't be bothered. Turns out I had a copy for years under a third title, GI BRO!Loads and loads of groovy model work. Speaking of model work ... CODENAME WILDGEESE (Margheriti, 1984)
... is really exceptionally entertai
ning. Its up there with GOLD RAIDERS as my most-satisfying 25 cent purchase. Ernest Borgnine spends the majority of his scenes looking tired and sitting down. Lee Van Cleef does not look well at all and they couldn't even show him getting in or out of a helicopter ... I guess he needed a little help. They just pan over and he starts to walk away from the cockpit like he just got out of it. Anyway, totally NOT a sequel to THE WILD GEESE ... Although it does have mercenaries in it. Totally awesome set pieces with miniatures, one sequence with a gravity-defying sports car driving ALONG a tunnel wall, the other a real showstopper with a fragile-looking helicopter attacking a camp and raining napalm down on Klaus Kinski's head! Seriously ... AWESOME ending.RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS (Deodato, 1983)
... Disappointing. Very silly a
nd uneventful knockoff of THE ROAD WARRIOR by Ruggero Deodato. I still can't quite suss out what the plot was all about ... I think Atlantis raises, but then a bunch of biker trash attack our band of heroes, and I couldn't quite decide if Atlantis was controlling Earthbound bikers to do bad things, or if they WERE Atlanteans, only appearing on "Earth," or if our heroes were supposed to be ON Atlantis??? Whatever, it was stupid anyway. Awesome box art though. It looks like Ryan O'neal dressed as up Rambo!DEATH DIMENSION (Adamson, 1978)
DEATH DIMENSION, "starring" Jim Kelly and his afro, delivers incredible pleasure to lovers of truly awful, awful films. It stinks of cheapness from beginning to end, and has all the production value of a Chest
Rockwell movie. I honestly do believe they had a limited amount of film stock because they seem to have been perfectly fine shooting everything in one take, including the fight scenes (which could REALLY have benefitted from some editing and choreography ... and people who can actually fight). I mean its just shockingly stupid and lame from the get-go. Harold Sakata, amusingly credited as Harold "Odd Job" Sakata (which is sorta like always reminding the audience that Russ Tamblyn was "from West Side Story"), is painfully slow in his fight scenes where he is shown "beating up" Kelly ... Which is confusing as he is obviously a very strong and musclebound kinda guy. His arms look like barrels! Seriously, he's huge. But man, S-L-O-W. What's supposed to be a climactic throwdown ends up resembling two old men playing charades. Its real sad. There's a big fight too with a helicopter menacing a cable car, and a couple guys shoot uselessly at each other with .38s across the gorge between them! What a freakin waste of time. I won't even describe the last minute ... Must be seen to be believed, but let's just say it involves 1) another .38, 2) a Piper airplane, 3) stock footage of an explosion, and 4) hasty editing. And then Jim Kelly does a flying kick into the audience's FACE! Take THAT, audience!
DEATH DIMENSION, "starring" Jim Kelly and his afro, delivers incredible pleasure to lovers of truly awful, awful films. It stinks of cheapness from beginning to end, and has all the production value of a Chest
Rockwell movie. I honestly do believe they had a limited amount of film stock because they seem to have been perfectly fine shooting everything in one take, including the fight scenes (which could REALLY have benefitted from some editing and choreography ... and people who can actually fight). I mean its just shockingly stupid and lame from the get-go. Harold Sakata, amusingly credited as Harold "Odd Job" Sakata (which is sorta like always reminding the audience that Russ Tamblyn was "from West Side Story"), is painfully slow in his fight scenes where he is shown "beating up" Kelly ... Which is confusing as he is obviously a very strong and musclebound kinda guy. His arms look like barrels! Seriously, he's huge. But man, S-L-O-W. What's supposed to be a climactic throwdown ends up resembling two old men playing charades. Its real sad. There's a big fight too with a helicopter menacing a cable car, and a couple guys shoot uselessly at each other with .38s across the gorge between them! What a freakin waste of time. I won't even describe the last minute ... Must be seen to be believed, but let's just say it involves 1) another .38, 2) a Piper airplane, 3) stock footage of an explosion, and 4) hasty editing. And then Jim Kelly does a flying kick into the audience's FACE! Take THAT, audience! INVADERS OF THE LOST GOLD (Birkinshaw, 1982)
The creme de la creme of shit jungle action flicks surely
must be INVADERS OF THE LOST GOLD (aka HORROR SAFARI!). "Part CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and part RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK!" exclaims the box, but this is a LIE. Although the distributor can be forgiven this transgression, as deception would seem the only viable way to get this stinker out of the warehouse. Which, of course, makes it AWESOME. OK not really. Again "starring" Sakata, he is joined by an aged and wobbly Woddy Strode and a boozy Stuart Whitman. You know you are in trouble when the best performance comes from STUART WHITMAN of all people. Story involves inept adventurers trying to recover lost Jap gold from its jungle hiding place, each one dropping dead at the merest hint of danger. One guy gets eaten by a crocodile but the effect is achieved ENTIRELY through editing (and is super lame). Another guy falls off a rope bridge but when we see his body laying there it looks like he only fell about 6 feet. One bozo gets bit by a snake. And Laura Gemser is rewarded for showing her cute butt and boobies by spontaneously dropping dead for no given reason. Its utterly bizarre and one is forced to wonder if she did not simply leave the set one day and the director decided to try and depict a death scene (which does not work at all and seems incongruous), with other characters later pondering "what happened to her?" No explanation is ever given and it remains a mystery. Topping matters off is the fact this is hands down the single worst print of a film I have ever seen, PERIOD, and continuity questions are muddied further by the possibility we could just be missing a few vital, revelatory frames (which does seem to be the case with Gemser's bathing scene, which skips around a bit any time she threatens to turn around and reveal more than PG-rated nudity). This print is a NIGHTMARE, dirty, nay, FILTHY, and scratched up throughout, missing the ends of sentences and littered with jumpcuts and myriad arcane scribblings that must have meant an awful lot of something to a score of international projectionists. Several frames have big "X's" through them, some have squiggles, some have squares drawn in random places ... Its bizarre and mystifying. I loved it, especially the process of trying to decipher just what was occurring (whenever "action" accurred that is). Hell, at one point I was convinced Sakata had just died, but it was just some other guy instead. Scenes shift exposures back and forth, creating the impression of moving from day to night and back again, and the music swells at some of the lamest and most uneventful occurences.
Lost gold? This movie is PURE gold.
The creme de la creme of shit jungle action flicks surely
must be INVADERS OF THE LOST GOLD (aka HORROR SAFARI!). "Part CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and part RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK!" exclaims the box, but this is a LIE. Although the distributor can be forgiven this transgression, as deception would seem the only viable way to get this stinker out of the warehouse. Which, of course, makes it AWESOME. OK not really. Again "starring" Sakata, he is joined by an aged and wobbly Woddy Strode and a boozy Stuart Whitman. You know you are in trouble when the best performance comes from STUART WHITMAN of all people. Story involves inept adventurers trying to recover lost Jap gold from its jungle hiding place, each one dropping dead at the merest hint of danger. One guy gets eaten by a crocodile but the effect is achieved ENTIRELY through editing (and is super lame). Another guy falls off a rope bridge but when we see his body laying there it looks like he only fell about 6 feet. One bozo gets bit by a snake. And Laura Gemser is rewarded for showing her cute butt and boobies by spontaneously dropping dead for no given reason. Its utterly bizarre and one is forced to wonder if she did not simply leave the set one day and the director decided to try and depict a death scene (which does not work at all and seems incongruous), with other characters later pondering "what happened to her?" No explanation is ever given and it remains a mystery. Topping matters off is the fact this is hands down the single worst print of a film I have ever seen, PERIOD, and continuity questions are muddied further by the possibility we could just be missing a few vital, revelatory frames (which does seem to be the case with Gemser's bathing scene, which skips around a bit any time she threatens to turn around and reveal more than PG-rated nudity). This print is a NIGHTMARE, dirty, nay, FILTHY, and scratched up throughout, missing the ends of sentences and littered with jumpcuts and myriad arcane scribblings that must have meant an awful lot of something to a score of international projectionists. Several frames have big "X's" through them, some have squiggles, some have squares drawn in random places ... Its bizarre and mystifying. I loved it, especially the process of trying to decipher just what was occurring (whenever "action" accurred that is). Hell, at one point I was convinced Sakata had just died, but it was just some other guy instead. Scenes shift exposures back and forth, creating the impression of moving from day to night and back again, and the music swells at some of the lamest and most uneventful occurences.Lost gold? This movie is PURE gold.
posted by figurebuilder at 1:36 PM
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